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Guzen and Hitsuzen

Let me begin this piece by introducing two technical terms, guzen and hitsuzen. Both are stolen from Japanese, and their translations come out to being something like coincidence or chance and fate or...

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Ownership And Its Paradoxes

Ownership is a strange thing. Unlike possession, ownership is not easily defined in physical terms. Possession we can define as having physical control over something. Thus if I hold a thing in my hand...

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An Event Ontology

It is natural to ground a metaphysical system in objects. The English language, along with most other western languages, is an object centric language. Sentences are constructed primarily by describing...

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A Reasonable Form of Dualism

I have never been fond of dualism. I have confidence in the ability of science to explain the world, and so when I was first exposed to the mind-body problem it seemed plausible to me that science...

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Ontology as Metaphilosophy

Ontology is something of a fad in philosophy; sometimes it is regarded as the core and foundation of metaphysics, and at others it is held up as an example of what not to do. But what is ontology?...

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The Philosopher As Artist

It is common to view the philosopher as a kind of scientist, a view I call “the philosopher as scientist”. Philosopher as mathematician also has some traction, but then again mathematician as scientist...

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The Constitution of Happiness

The problem of human happiness, like so many difficult philosophical problems, has both an obvious answer and, at the same time, is completely obscure. The problem of human happiness is the question...

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Free Will And Quantum Physics

An advocate of determinism can be supporting to one of two things. The first is a specific kind of physical laws, where each initial state has only a single possible successor state at any given future...

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Beyond Sense and Nonsense

Personally I am an advocate of the idea that the universe is essentially a meaningless place, onto which we impose meaning. We create significance, we constitute it – we don’t find it. However, there...

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The Virtues of Unintuitive Philosophy

It is commonly thought that being intuitive, or agreeing with common sense, is a virtue in a philosophical theory. But the opposite is really the case. Philosophy that is intuitive is rarely worth...

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